But this is not all, for in his letter written to console Apollonios Plutarch carries us further. There was, he says, a {99} man who lost his only son--he was afraid, by poison. It perhaps adds confidence to the story that Plutarch gives his name and home; he was Elysios of Terina in Southern Italy. The precision is characteristic. Elysios accordingly went to a _psychomanteion_, a shrine where the souls of the dead might be consulted.[86] He duly sacrificed and went to sleep in the temple. He saw in a dream his own father with a youth strikingly like the dead son, and he was told that this was "the son's daemon,"[87] and that the death had been natural, and right for the lad and for his parents. Elsewhere Plutarch quotes the lines of Menander-- By each man standeth, from his natal hour, A daemon, his kind mystagogue through life--[88] but he prefers the view of Empedocles that there are two such beings in attendance on each of us.[89] The classical instance of a guardian spirit was the "daimonion" of Socrates, on which both Plutarch and Apuleius wrote books.[90] Plutarch discusses many theories that had been given of it, but hardly convinces the reader that he really knew what Socrates meant. In a later generation it was held that if proper means were taken the guardian spirit would come visibly before a man's eyes. So Apuleius held, and Porphyry records that when an Egyptian priest called on the daemon of Plotinus to manifest himself in the temple of Isis (the only "pure" spot the Egyptian {100} could find in Rome), there came not a daemon but a god; so great a being was Plotinus.[91] Plutarch discusses the question of such bodily appearances in connexion with the legend of Numa and Egeria. He can believe that God would not disdain the society of a specially good and holy man, but as for the idea that god or daemon would have anything to do with a human body--"that would indeed require some persuasion." "Yet the Egyptians plausibly say that it is not impossible for the spirit of a god to have intercourse with a woman and beget some beginnings of life," though Plutarch finds a difficulty in such a union of unequals.[92] Plutarch has comparatively little to say of visible appearances of tutelary or other daemons. To what lengths of credulity men went in this direction will be shown in a later chapter. Yet a guardian who does not communicate in some way with the person he guards, and a series of daemonic and divine powers content to be inert and silent, would be futile; and in fact there was, Plutarch held, abundance of communication between men and the powers above them. It was indeed one of the main factors of his religion that man's life is intimately related to the divine.